


one need not be a chamber (to be haunted)

by andtheblueberrymuffins



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Plot, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 07:17:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12812439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andtheblueberrymuffins/pseuds/andtheblueberrymuffins
Summary: Shiro hesitates near her, turning an empty mug in his hands before he asks, “So, can we look forward to your ghost story next time?”Allura smiles at him—she feels she is always smiling at him—and says, “Unfortunately, no. I do not have one to tell.”He smiles back, lingering near her. “That’s too bad,” he says.





	one need not be a chamber (to be haunted)

Allura was not brought up to believe in ghosts.

Her parents taught her to believe that the dead rejoined the quintessence of the universe, blending with that cosmic energy and dispersing. No portion of them remained to harass or aid those yet living. The closest you could expect to get to those who died was, perhaps, a brush of familiarity when drawing on the energy of the universe.

She believed that with full faith as a child; as an adult she believes because she feels her mother, her father, all those others who she lost, when she reaches out to the cosmos. She believes that they are one, now, with the quintessence that surrounds all those who live.

But she has heard plenty about what other cultures believe. There are those who think their dead are reborn. There are those who think the dead are swept up to one paradise or another. And there are those who believe the dead return to influence the living.

The Paladins tell stories about such things, one evening, early in their acquaintance. They gather in the common room with a lantern, turning off the rest of the lights, and telling one another stories about the unrestful dead, about spirits that return to seek vengeance, beings fueled by anger or hatred or fear.

They seem solely to want to frighten one another, something Allura does not fully understand. It is not the usage stories were put to on Altea, and she has nothing to add, listening to Hunk finish a story that makes Lance squeak and grab onto Pidge and Shiro. 

“I think that’s enough for tonight,” Shiro says, ignoring the grumbling protests of the others as they yawn and head off to their rooms. Allura watches them go, not yet ready to face the emptiness of her own quarters, and Shiro hesitates near her, turning an empty mug in his hands before he asks, “So, can we look forward to your ghost story next time?”

She smiles at him—she feels she is always smiling at him—and says, “Unfortunately, no. I do not have one.”

He smiles back, lingering near her. “That’s too bad,” he says, and Allura opens her mouth, trying to find something else to say, to continue the conversation, but they are interrupted by another emergency.

#

Allura does not think of ghost stories much in the coming phoebs. There is not time, not with fighting the Galra, not with training, not with the construction of the giant teludav. There is time for little enough at all, not before they enact their mad plan, and what time she has is not concerned with stories.

It is concerned with Shiro, who snags her arm in the moments before they must put their plan into motion and says, “I’ve been—I’ve been thinking. About things I want to do. Before I die.”

Allura stares at him, momentarily taken off her guard. Her own thoughts have been consumed with what must be done. She has not allowed room for wants or desires, because that feels like a floodgate that cannot be shut again, if recklessly opened. That does not stop her from saying, “Oh?”

“Yeah,” he says, wetting his bottom lip and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “And I—this isn’t the best time. I know that. But I’m not sure you and I will—I don’t know if there’s going to be a better time.” He grimaces.

For a moment, thoughts of the impending battle slip from her mind. It is the first time that has happened in so long. She cocks her head to the side. “For what?” she asks, her heart beating faster in her chest, as though her body already knows what he’s talking about.

He swallows, hard. They are standing so close. His gaze dips down and then jerks back, and she can see things in his eyes that she has imagined she saw there before. They seem clear, all of a sudden, as though the thrum of upcoming battle has brought them into focus. “Oh,” she says again, “oh.”

“I want,” he starts, stuttering to a stop when she reaches up to touch his jaw.

“Yes,” she says, and when he leans down, she pushes up. It is a short kiss, soft, brief. They lack the time for anything longer. 

He pulls back after a moment, a smile flitting across his mouth. He says, “After this is over, can we…?”

“We can,” she tells him, something in her chest shifting, trying to move beneath the weight of dread that has buried her heart. “I would like that.”

He steals one more kiss, then, before they are both called away to their duties. She does not have time to think more on the promise of their interaction, not during the madness, and certainly not afterwards, once they discover that Shiro is gone.

She stands in the hangar, in front of Black, immediately after the battle, once the others have gone away, her head and her chest achingly empty, a strange feeling creeping over her.

The sensation is cold and it slides down the inside of her skin, making her shiver. She rubs at the back of her neck, looking around the empty hangar—the others have all gone to rest, the fight against Zarkon, their mad plan, took all of their reserves—and finds no one. There are no sounds but her own breathing, no hint of movement.

But she swears, nonetheless, that she feels cold pressure around her shoulders, like icy metal pressed directly to her skin, right through her uniform. She shivers, an ugly weight pressing in her gut, and says, “Hello?” She gets no answer. 

Of course she gets no answer. There is no one else around. There is no one else even awake. And Shiro is—is not there, to remind her that she should rest, as well. She scrubs at her eyes, grateful, at least, that no one else is around to see her talking to thin air.

He is gone. Disappeared. And it is not as though she was unaware of the risks or the danger. That, for some reason, does not ease the tightness around her ribs or the ache in her gut. She returns to her quarters, to her bed, and curls onto her side, pressing her hands over her face, smothering tears no one is around to hear.

#

The cold feeling follows Allura around sporadically over the following quintants, as she tries to figure out what to do now and how to handle the fact that they can no longer form Voltron. It is not a constant companion, but it runs down the back of her neck frequently enough that, by the time Black accepts Keith, she visits the infirmary and runs tests on herself.

They do not show anything amiss, aside from high levels of stress and markers for exhaustion. But she already knew about those issues. Ice freezes around her fingers in thick bands when she curls her hands into fists, and she does not know why. Something unseen and impossible pushes against her forehead, sending shivers down her throat.

And the strangest thing is that it is, somehow, almost comforting.

#

By the time they find Shiro, floating in space, moments away from death, Allura has gotten used to the cold. She does not know what it is, though she assumes it is some type of stress reaction, or a problem with her nervous system caused by either powering the massive wormhole, or taking the blast of destructive energy from Haggar and her druids. The issue is worsening, slowly, but she can think of nothing to do about it, so she does not tell the others.

They have enough to worry about. And it does not affect her work. She pilots the Blue Lion without a problem.

The cold intensifies terribly the first time she is around Shiro after his return. It curls around her, so cold it’s almost hot where it touches her arms, her shoulders, her sides and back. It makes it physically hard to breathe, just from the force of the shivers that shake her. It ruins what should be a joyous occasion.

Shiro does not seem to notice—though she expected him to, half-thought that he would look at her upon his return and just know that something was wrong. That was foolish, apparently. He does not look at her at all, really. But… But. He appears to have been through a lot, and she is shaking too hard to interact with him, anyway. She excuses herself from the greeting party, stumbling once she is out of their sight and bracing her hands on the wall.

Her breath steams in the air in front of her face. Something cold moves up and down her back. She does not know what is wrong with her. She squeezes her eyes shut and forces the sharp jags of fear aside. She can’t worry about this—whatever this is. She does not have time.

#

The cold worsens severely whenever Allura is around Shiro. It gets to the point that she avoids him, because the cold hurts near him, it gets in her bones and clatters her teeth together. She expects him to ask about it—he has always… checked on her, and after their last conversation, she thought… well—but he seems preoccupied. Perhaps their last interaction was just… pre-battle jitters for him. Perhaps he changed his mind. 

Still, Allura is cautiously hopeful when she hears him call her name, one day.

She looks up, bracing for the cold and plastering on a smile, and finds… an empty corridor. She blinks, turning in a small circle and asking, “Shiro?” She gets no answer and frowns, walking towards where the sound came from. “Shiro?”

“Princess!” His voice is distant. It sounds like he’s screaming, yelling for her. Her heart trips, a thousand thoughts about what could have gone wrong surging through her head. She breaks into a run, calling for him again, and—

And he steps out of a room along the hall, staring at her, worried, as he asks, “Princess, what’s wrong?”

“What do you mean?” she asks. “I heard you calling for me.”

He blinks at her, cocking his head to the side. “I was just… resting,” he says, gesturing into his quarters. “I wasn’t calling for anyone.”

She says, “Oh,” because she does not know what else to say. Why would he lie about it, after all?

She already knew something was wrong with her. Nerve damage. It must be. And it must be worsening, instead of improving. A bad sign. She shivers, the cold curling up against her flesh, and feigns a smile. “Of course, my apologies. I must have heard something else.”

“Right,” he says, still watching her, his dark eyes sharp. He asks, “Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” she lies, desperate to get away, to escape the freezing cold building in her bones. “Yes, I’m sorry, again, for bothering you.”

He does not follow her when she leaves.

#

The medical scans she subjects herself to don’t show anything wrong with her. Not even when she hears Shiro calling for her again, alone in her room. She stares at the wall, listening to him yell for her, and sinking slowly to the ground, covering her face with her hands, wondering if she is simply going mad.

The scans would not pick that up.

#

“Princess!” the voice that is only in her head yells at her, the next day, as she walks down the hall. 

She winces against the sound of it. She hisses, “Leave me alone.”

“Princess?” Hunk asks, turning the corner and blinking at her, concern written all over his expression. “Everything alright?”

“Yes,” she lies, fabricating a smile for him. “Of course.”

Nothing is alright. Shiro yells for her when she walks through the Castle and in battle. And the cold clings to her skin. She does not know what to do. She can find no solution through her research and she cannot trouble the others with her small problems. They have far larger issues to juggle than her delusions.

“Princess,” Shiro says, that night, in the scant hours when she should be sleeping. She cannot see him, but she feels his hands, freezing cold, wrapped around her shoulders. She feels his forehead, grimy, pressed against hers. She can smell him, this time. “Please,” he says, “please, I need your help. You have to help me.”

And she is so tired. Afraid. This is the first time he has remained for so long, the first time he has said more than her name. Her hallucinations are lasting longer and longer. There is no way that is anything but a bad sign. 

She asks, frightened beyond anything she has ever felt before, and helpless, “How?”

But he is already gone, leaving her alone in the dark with only the fading echoes of his voice to keep her company.

She curls her shoulders over, covers her face with her hands, and weeps.

#

“Hey, are you alright?” Shiro asks her, the next day, and she only realizes it is the real Shiro when he leans over, looking into her face. There is a furrow of worry between his brows and an unhappy set to his mouth.

She forces a smile. “Yes, of course. Why?”

He keeps staring at her. The cold spreads over her skin, terrible and painful. He says, slowly, “Because I called for you six times and you didn’t answer me.”

“Oh,” she says, feeling sick to her stomach. She heard him just fine. She just thought it was the Shiro in her head. The one that isn’t real. The hallucination. “Sorry,” she says, waving a dismissive hand. “I was… thinking about something. What did you need?”

“It wasn’t that important. Maybe you should get some rest,” he says, still watching her. He starts to reach out for her, and then he hisses, drawing back sharply, his hand coming up to his jaw. A second later he takes another step away, pressing his other hand to his chest. He looks confused.

She says, trying to conceal the way her body is shaking. “Yes. Yes, maybe I should.”

#

Allura ends up curled up on her bed, her arms wrapped around her stomach. She is so cold. She does not know what is happening and it frightens her. “Please,” she says, against her wet pillow, “please, stop.”

#

It does not stop. It just… continues, all the way up to the day Keith rejoins them, his face thinner than it was when he left to work with the Blade, his eyes older. Allura listens to a voice that isn’t there yelling in her ears for help as she paces, sleepless, around her room.

“Tell me how to help you,” she pleads to no-one, to her own madness. “Tell me how, and I will. I’ll do anything.”

She’d do anything to make this stop.

#

“I don’t know where I am,” the hallucination tells her, one day, as she stands at her station on the bridge. “I think it has something to do with the bayard.”

“Your bayard?” she asks, and Coran turns to look at her. 

“Princess?” he says, taking a step towards her. He looks worried. They all do, these days. It’s nothing personal. Having Lotor temporarily on the Castle has put everyone on edge. She waves a hand at him, straining her ears for a reply that does not come.

#

Allura mulls over what her hallucination told her, that evening, while the others are eating. Her appetite has failed, of late. She blames Lotor’s presence amongst them. She can feel him watching her, sometimes, but she has barely noticed. Her thoughts are busy with other problems. 

She places her mostly full bowl to the side when Shiro stands from the table. She follows him into the hall, ignoring the warning band of cold around her right arm. He looks across at her, nodding, and says, “Princess. How are you?”

“Fine,” she lies, it is a familiar action, now. “May I see your bayard?”

He blinks at her and then down at the weapon hanging on his belt. “I… sure,” he says, unlatching it and handing it over. It is larger than Blue’s bayard, but only for a moment. It shifts shape to fit her grip. He asks, “Is there… some problem with it?”

“Potentially,” Allura says, frowning at it. She does not know what she thinks she’s doing. She has, perhaps, gone completely mad. “Could I keep this, for the evening?”

Shiro looks concerned. He says, “You think there’s something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Allura says, honestly. She does not know anything, anymore. She hears voices no one else does. That’s never a good thing.

“Well,” Shiro says, shrugging, “keep it as long as you need. Let me know what you find out.”

“I will,” she says, relieved when he nods and steps away. He never lingers in her presence. She has, absently, wondered if he feels the same cold she does. But, of course, he does not. This is her defect. No one else is affected. She has asked. His reasons for not wishing to be around her are different. They have never discussed their brief kisses.

She cradles the bayard, wondering what she thinks she’s doing with it, and then sighs. If she has it, she might as well run some tests on it.

#

She has the lab to herself, at least temporarily. Allura places the bayard under one of the scanners and leans back to stare at it, raising her thumb to her mouth and worrying at her nail. It is a habit she has picked up, recently.

She jerks when the door opens, and feels a terrible weight settle into her gut when Lotor steps into the lab.

She has avoided being alone with him, since he joined them. She does not trust him, or the slant of his smile, or the way he looks at her. “Princess,” he says, smiling and sketching a bow, “I have been looking for you.”

“I cannot imagine why,” Allura says, turning her body to block the bayard. She does not know what his purpose among them is, not really. But she does not doubt that it is intended to in some way further his own ends.

He arches one pale eyebrow, waving the door closed and stepping towards her. “Can you not?” he asks, cocking his head to the side. “Have I been doing all the imagining for us both?”

Allura raises her chin. He makes her skin crawl. “Apparently,” she says, speaking with a calmness she does not feel.

He chuckles, moving another step closer. She dislikes that he is directly in the path to the door. “Well,” he says, his voice low and dark, “I believe I have done admirably, then.”

“I am sure you do,” she says, and he grins, sharp and quick.

“Princess,” he starts, drawing to a stop in front of her. He is tall, terribly so. And he stopped too close. He leans forward, resting one hand on the counter, too near her waist. “I wished to—”

And then he cuts off, taking a jerking step backwards. He bends over, his hands going to his face. He makes a sharp sound, pained, and scrambles back, again. He looks up at her, through his hair, his eyes wild and furious, and demands, “What—”

His words are swallowed by a grunt as he curls an arm around his waist. He makes a sound halfway between coughing and gagging; blood splatters from his lips, landing in dark droplets across the floor, and he waves the door open, stumbling out without trying to say anything else.

Allura breathes shakily in the empty room, afterwards. The blood remains, wet and purplish. She walks over to it and kneels, rubs her fingers through it and feels the wetness. She smears it on a cloth and it remains. It has a physical presence. Unless she is hallucinating it. Unless she hallucinated Lotor. Unless—

The machine scanning the bayard beeps, drawing her thoughts back from the terrible path they were winding down.

She presses the back of her hand against her mouth and then breathes out slowly. “Thank you,” she says, into the empty air, to nothing. Ice brushes across her shoulders, curls around the back of her neck. She sinks into it, drawing comfort from something that isn’t there.

#

Allura expects fully that nothing will be wrong with the bayard. Not really. A hallucination asked her to look into it. That is far from a credible recommendation.

But the scans tell a different story. Allura stares at the information scrolling across the screens, her heart pounding at her ribs. She feels sick to her stomach. Confused. She is half sure, as always, these days, that what she is seeing is not real. And so she turns on her comm and says, “Hunk, Pidge, could you join me?” After a beat, she adds, “Bring your bayards.”

#

“I don’t understand,” Hunk says, vargas later, when they’ve run a half-dozen scans. His voice has gotten progressively louder. “I don’t—so the Black bayard has this programming, right, which we probably should have expected, what with the Galra having it for ten-thousand years, and everything. Of course they booby-trapped it.”

“I’d have booby-trapped it,” Pidge agrees, temporarily removing her tongue from the corner of her mouth. “And it’s pretty clever, from what we can tell from the leftover code, or spell, or whatever. It was a trap designed to, well, dimensionally displace anyone who was not Zarkon who attempted to use the bayard.”

“’Dimensionally displace,’” Allura says, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Something cold squeezes her shoulders and then cups her jaw. Ice presses against her forehead. “What does that mean?”

“Mm, not sure,” Hunk says, shrugging. “But it doesn’t really matter. It looks like the trap went off when Shiro first used the bayard but…. It didn’t work, obviously. I don’t know why.”

“Yeah, I guess it transported him to a Galra ship, instead. Or maybe it worked fine and dimensional displacement is just the method that was used to move him from point to point?” Pidge leans back in her chair, stretching her legs out and tapping the tip of a pen against her glasses.

“That sounds possible,” Hunk says, looking away from the screens to frown over at Allura. “The Galra have some crazy tech.” He sighs. “What made you think about this in the first place?”

Allura blinks at him. It is a question she should have expected. But she has not been sleeping much and her thoughts are so busy. She feigns a weak smile. “Oh,” she says, “something strange showed up on a diagnostic the other day. Is there—does there seem to be a way to reverse the displacement?”

“Why?” Pidge asks, burying a yawn in her hand. “I mean, we kind of already did, right? Shiro’s back.”

“Right,” Allura says, staring at the bayard as ice threads between her fingers and squeezes her hand. “Of course.”

She cannot think of a way to convince them to stay when they excuse themselves to their rooms. She hesitates before picking up the bayard, her hand sinking down into cold when she finally reaches for it. 

#

Allura does not recall the walk back to her room. Her pulse jerks along unevenly through her veins. She feels winded and cannot draw in a proper breath, not even with the door securely shut at her back. Perhaps that actually makes it worse.

Her room is empty. She knows it is. She checks. She steadies herself on her mattress, scrambling towards her bathroom and waving on the hot water, standing in the small room until steam fills the air and fogs the mirror. She bathes and does not feel better. She has forgotten what better feels like. She dresses and then she pauses and asks, “Shiro?”

There is no answer. Her throat tightens. Her eyes burn. She presses the bayard against her ribs, her arms curled tightly over it. She has lost her mind. That is the only option that makes sense, the only—

“Shiro, please,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut. “Please, if it’s—if you’re there, if—”

“Allura,” an impossible voice says. Fingers of ice stroke back across her cheek. With her eyes closed, she can feel the hand on her shoulder, the presence of a body close to her. “I’m here.”

She snaps her eyes open and cries out in her empty room, sinking as her knees fail her. She cannot trust her senses. But she does not know what else to trust, what to believe, what—

There is a strange sound. She looks around for it, and bites back another cry as an invisible finger draws through the fog on her mirror. I’m here, it writes. Help me. And a handprint appears, familiar. Allura reaches for the mark, her hand shaking badly by the time she fits her palm and fingers inside it. The condensation on the mirror is warm. The air around her skin is bitingly cold.

“How—how do I help you?” she asks, avoiding her eyes in the mirror. “I think you must be…” she pauses, shuddering, and presses on, “in another dimension. But I don’t know how to get to you. And I don’t… I don’t know who—there’s another Shiro here.” She ends the words at a whisper. “I don’t know who he is.”

Not me, it writes. Be careful I can’t h

Allura waits for the rest of the word, but it does not appear. The air in the bathroom warms a not inconsiderably amount. “Shiro?” she calls, turning in a circle, but she gets no answer. The hallucination—the visitation—the whatever—has passed. It is the longest one she can remember.

He is either getting stronger or she is getting worse.

She shudders, though she no longer has reason to be cold.

#

As Allura sees it, there are three possibilities for what is going on. 

The first is that she was, as she assumed initially, badly damaged by her injuries. All of this could be in her head, the product of some terrible injury to her brain and her nervous system. No one else feels the cold. No one else has mentioned anything about hearing voices—she does not doubt that they would, they talk about everything.

The second is that it’s all real. That Haggar’s trap worked and threw Shiro into some other dimension, where he has, somehow, managed to contact her to ask for assistance. The thought horrifies Allura for a number of reasons, not least because she does not know who the man in the Castle with Shiro’s face is, if it is true.

And finally, there is the possibility that she is indeed being contacted by something in a different dimension, something that is not Shiro. She knows there are beings beyond the dimensional barrier. The odds that they desire to cross over seem high. They could be using her. Tricking her.

She knows, logically, that the first option is the most likely. It always has been. But logic has increasingly little to do with her actions. Her heart tells her that Shiro needs her help, and she will not deny him. She cannot.

A knock at her door startles her from her thoughts. She’d been pacing her room, turning the Black bayard over and over in her hands, hoping that Shiro would return, that he could give her further answers. She finds the man with his face on the other side of her door; a shiver walks on skeletal fingers down her spine.

“Princess,” he says, smiling a little, “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m fine.” The lie is more familiar than the truth, these days. “I was just about to get some sleep.” Another lie.

“Good,” he says, and then winces. “I mean, you look—we could all use some rest. I, um, Pidge said that you’d… finished with my bayard. So.” He glances down, pointedly, at where she holds it.

Allura tightens her grip on the bayard. She does not really need it any longer. The scans have recorded every piece of information she could possibly need from it. But she does not want him to have it. Her smile feels frozen on her mouth. She says, “Unfortunately, I have not.”

He nods a little, dragging a hand back through his hair and stepping a little closer. She fights the urge to step back. Retreat indicates weakness, her mother’s voice reminds her, in the back of her head. He reaches out and touches her arm, soft, near her wrist. His voice has gone gentle when he says, “Listen, are you—are you sure you’re alright? You’ve been… quiet.” He takes a little breath and strokes his thumb across her wrist. “You know you can tell me about it. Whatever is worrying you. Right?”

She looks up into his open expression. His skin is warm, where he touches her. For a moment, looking at him, it seems painfully obvious that she has been—is still—delusional. The weight of it hits her all at once. Of course this is Shiro. What has she even been thinking? She should just tell him, and they can deal with whatever is wrong with her, and—

And the bayard in her hand hums, suddenly, pulsing with light as cold enfolds her hand. Shiro says, “What—?” and then he jerks back a step, his hand fisting in the front of his shirt, over his sternum, as he folds forward at the waist.

“Don’t touch her,” he snaps—but it isn’t him, is it, his mouth doesn’t move—and either Allura has developed telekinesis, something not unheard of, strictly, among Alteans, or she is not as crazy as she thought.

Shiro—the Shiro she can see—straightens. He looks confused, and Allura makes herself ask, through lips that feel numb, “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he says, looking around the corridor, “yes, I don’t—that was strange. Did you feel… something, just then? Something cold? When the bayard activated?”

“Yes,” she says, because that feels safe to admit. She frowns down at it, now inactive once more. “I told you I was not finished trying to determine what was going on with it.”

“I see that,” he says, ruefully, rubbing at a spot near the middle of his chest. “Do you need any help with it?”

“Not right now,” she says, because she wants him to leave, because she does not know the answer, because she does not know anything. “I will let you know if I do.”

She watches hm leave, to ensure that he does, and then steps back into her room, and closes her door, and sinks down to the floor, unable to stop the shaking in her limbs any longer. She does not know how long she sits there until bands of cold enfold her, and, with her eyes closed, she can feel the way Shiro pulls her against his chest, the way her head fits under his chin, the comforting sweep of his hand, up and down her arm.

#

So, this is not all in her head. She has proof of that now, solid proof—unless whatever happened in the corridor really was a bayard malfunction, unless Shiro wasn’t really ever there, unless, but, no, no, that can’t be possible. Something is contacting her. And while it may not be Shiro, not really, she will not risk his life by assuming that.

There is a chance it is him. There is a chance he is trapped, somehow, across the dimension barrier.

She will bring him back.

The only question is how. She spends the next quintant pouring over everything she can find about opening a dimensional tear along with the remnants of the spell left over in the bayard. She stares at the screens, the stones in her gut grinding together, and then nods, fairly certain she knows how to do it, though the power required will be… immense.

She has supplied immense amounts of power before.

There are other issues to consider, of course. She cannot open a tear on the Castle, obviously. She cannot open it on any inhabited world. She does not what else could try to come through. And she knows of only one way to close a tear once it is opened.

It is not difficult to find an uninhabited moon in a system long ago ravaged and left barren by the Galra. Her scans show that she can breathe in its atmosphere, and that is all she requires. She only needs to find a way to get there, quickly, and without the others realizing.

She is sane enough to know they will probably try to stop her, sane enough to know how crazy what she is doing would sound to anyone else.

She waits until most of them sleep—no one ever seems to sleep all at the same time—and then she gathers the Black bayard and goes to the hangar. Her heart hums along inside her ribs and she is grateful she is not alone. She can feel icy fingers curled around her hand. She stops in front of Blue, and stones grind inside her gut when the Lion does not respond.

“Please,” she says, standing at Blue’s foot, stung. She had not anticipated this, though she has not piloted the Lion in some time. She thought— “Please, I must go quickly.” Blue does not stir. Allura blinks back the sudden burn of tears. She’s so tired. “Please, I need—”

Movement from farther into the hangar steals her words. Allura turns as Black shifts, rising to her feet, the glow of her eyes lighting the huge space. “Oh,” Allura says, as the fingers around her hand tighten, “oh, of course.”

#

Piloting Black is not like piloting Blue, perhaps because Allura is not sure she is the one piloting anything. Cold suffuses her hands, moving them before she can even think of what she wants to do. They shoot away from the Castle, and Allura hopes that she disabled all of the relevant alarms, but it is, by that point, too late to do anything else about it.

#

The moon Allura picked is brown and gray and barren. Black settles in the middle of a crater, one full of rubble that recalls the buildings that once covered this place, thousands of years ago, before the Galra had their way with it.

Allura picks her way across the remains of a dead civilization, until she is out from under Black’s shadow. If something goes wrong—and she is not unaware that the odds are good something is going to go wrong—she hopes the Lion will have time to escape, to warn the others, to come and close the tear Allura is about to open in the universe.

“Alright,” she says, to the dead air, holding the bayard with both hands and taking a deep, grounding breath. “I hope you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” Shiro says, squeezing her hands one more time.

Allura shivers, swallowing hard. For a moment, it seems she is looking at her body from the outside, watching a mad woman risking the stability of the universe because the voices in her head have asked her to, and she—

She shudders. 

And she focuses on the spell Haggar developed. And she feeds energy down into bayard. Light flares out of the weapon, brilliant white. It envelopes her, stinging at her skin. The spell demands more of her quintessence, so she gives it. She gives and gives, shaping the spell, forming it through brute force, holding the power, harnessing it—

“Allura!” someone screams into her earpiece. Keith. She thinks it is Keith. They have found her then. She does not have much more time. “Princess! What are you doing?”

She ignores the question. She ignores the fact that they must be close, close enough to contact her. She grits her teeth and pushes more power into the spell. Someone yells at her once more, but her ears pop at that moment as the air pressure around her abruptly changes. It hurts, terribly. Something hot and wet runs down her neck.

But it does not matter, because the air flashes with cold and the world shakes and, before her face, the universe splits asunder.

For a moment, Allura can only stare into the glowing void. Wind whips out of it, buffeting her, trying to shove her back. She braces her legs. The spell cannot be disrupted. She does not know what will happen if it is. Perhaps the tear would collapse. Perhaps it would expand, unchecked. She can feel it pulling at the edges of her control, trying to grow beyond its already massive size.

She holds onto it, the effort setting fire to her bones. “Shiro!” she yells, unable to hear herself. “Hurry! I cannot hold it much longer!”

“I can’t!” he yells back and she can hear him, despite the wind, despite whatever happened to her ears. He’s in her head. Of course she can. “I—” She can hear the frustration and fear in his voice. “There’s a threshold! I can’t cross it. Allura!”

She cries out. She cannot pull him through. She can’t feel him. She can’t feel anything but pain and the strain of holding the tear in place. They have come so far, and she can’t—and it will be for nothing—and—

And a massive shape passes over her, only inches from the top of her head, diving through the tear. The Black Lion. Allura yells, wordlessly, watching the light close behind the massive Lion, her heart seizing in her chest. 

The Lion’s passage rips at her control. The tear fights to enlarge, and she screams, feeling the sound clawing out of her throat as the spell threatens to overrun her abilities. Open flame runs along her nerves. The inside of her mouth tastes of copper and salt. She can’t breathe. There are bands around her ribs, lead in her stomach, and lightning in her thoughts.

She tries to yell him name, one last time, but she cannot find the air.

She must close the tear, or she will not be able to. Her strength is failing. But. But she cannot strand Shiro there. She cannot. She must hold it, just a little longer. For just a few more ticks. She must, though she cannot, and so she does.

Spots swarm across her vision.

And there is a blur of blackness from within the shining void, a rush of movement over her head. The Black Lion. It has returned. Allura hopes to all that exists that it has brought back Shiro. She cannot wait any longer.

She bends all that remains of her energy onto the spell, gripping the edges of the tear with her magic and pulling. It fights her, resisting. She can feel other things moving on the other side, challenging her. Or maybe she only imagines that she does. It doesn’t matter. Little does.

She can focus on nothing but sipping at the air and forcing the hole in the universe to heal. She grits her teeth together so hard that it hurts, making one final effort to slam shut the gate.

The light around her disappears with a bang of sound that she feels rattling inside her bones and her body cavities. She stumbles back a step, wheezing for breath, shaking all over, the vibrations caught in her skin. Black made it through. Black made it out. She turns towards the giant Lion, stumbling over her feet, and gasps, “Shiro?”

There is a blur of movement. She can’t make it out past the black spots across her vision. They don’t disappear when she blinks. She is so tired. She hurts. She stretches out a hand and whispers, “Is that…?”

She cannot continue. She cannot even keep standing. The joints in her legs give, dropping her to her knees. She starts to topple sideways, and the idea of lying down is incredibly appealing, though she is not looking forward to hitting the ground.

In the end, she does not.

“Allura!” Shiro yells, from far away. He slides to his knees before her, as she falls, catching her on her way down. He is wearing his uniform. It is… battered. Dented. His hair is wild and longer than it should be. His beard has grown in across his cheeks and jaw.

“You’re here,” she says, her heart swelling in her chest. Her face feels strange and wet. A vice has her throat. She reaches up and touches him and he is cold, but not as cold as he has been. “You’re here. You’re here.” She laughs, raggedly.

“I’m here,” he says, gently, stroking her cheek. “Thanks to you.”

She laughs again, until the sounds become coughs, and he hushes her. “Sh, sh,” he says, adjusting his grip on her and lifting her easily. It feels like she is floating through the air. She rests her head against his shoulder and curls her arm around his neck, holding onto him. “Sh, I’m going to get you home. You’re going to be alright.”

“I am alright,” she tells him, dreamily, finally letting her eye fall shut. “You’re here.”

#

Allura has no recollection of traveling back to the Castle. The next thing she is aware of is a flood of light and distant, fuzzy sound. She stirs, disoriented to find that they are in the hangar. Shiro holds her, still, or again. Lance yells, from far away, “What—what the—what—put Allura down!”

Allura feels the vibration of Shiro’s voice when he speaks. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Look, I know this is confusing, but—”

“Confusing?” Hunk blurts. “Confusing? I mean, yeah, I’m pretty confused. It’s, what’s going on? Why do you have a beard all of a sudden? What happened to your armor? Where’d you two go? Why’d you open a dimensional portal? We picked it up in the scans, we thought Lotor was forcing Allura to do it, but—”

“Lotor,” Shiro interrupts, taking a step forward and tightening his hold. His voice has sharpened. “Where is he?”

“What? We thought he was with you,” Pidge answers. “Is he not with you?”

“No,” Shiro keeps moving forward. Allura closes her eyes again, because the world bobbles too much for her stomach to handle. “He’s not. And where’s the other one? The one that looks like me?”

There is a beat of silence, and then Keith demands, “What?” It is the last thing Allura hears before her mind drifts away into quiet and darkness.

#

Allura wakes to the opening of a healing pod, clear-headed and free of the pain in her ears. The lights in the infirmary are bright. Coran waits before her, his expression tense and his smile strained when he says, “Welcome back, Princess.”

Allura wets her dry lips, trying to order the jumble of her last memories. The world had ceased making much sense, in the moments before she passed out, or perhaps in the phoebs preceding that. She feels more rested than she has in some time. 

“Shiro?” she asks, clearing her throat when the word cracks. She needs some water. “Where is Shiro?”

“Actually,” Coran says, twisting his hands together a little, “we’d all like to speak with you about Shiro.”

#

The others wish to speak with her without Shiro, who, she finds, has been restricted to his quarters until she awoke. She stares at Coran after the revelation, sighs, and marches out into the hall. “Princess,” he calls, following in her wake, “just slow down for a moment. We are not sure who he is, and—”

“I am,” she says, and adds nothing else until she reaches his door. The others stand outside of it, looking awkward and miserable. Allura ignores them to knock, and a moment later the door slides open. Shiro’s tense frown transforms as he sees her, shifting to a smile. The beard remains, though it has been trimmed; Allura appreciates it as a way to set him apart from the other man who wore his face. He is wearing his normal clothes. 

“Shiro,” she says, relief cresting in her chest and bleeding into her tone. She takes another step, drawn forward by some force that rivals gravity for power, ignoring Hunk’s squawk of protest, to wrap her arms around him. “You’re really here.”

“I am,” he says, not hesitating to return her embrace. There is nothing cold about it, which is almost strange.

“Right,” Hunk says, “can, uh, can someone please tell the rest of us what exactly is going on?”

“I already told you,” Shiro says, sounding abruptly tired.

“Yeah, well, beard Shiro, I think we’d all feel better hearing it from the Princess, okay? No offense.”

Allura sighs. She does not want to tell the rest of them exactly what has been going on. But she can see no way around it. She eases out of Shiro’s embrace and turns to their expectant faces, drawing in a steadying breath when Shiro reaches out and takes her hand, warm instead of cold, but otherwise so familiar. She warns, “It is… a bit of a long story.”

#

They decamp to the common room, after a brief argument about whether or not Shiro should be allowed to accompany them. After Allura points out that, if he did not feel like cooperating, there would be no way for them to actually keep him in his quarters, they relent. Of Lotor and the other Shiro there is no sign.

“They’re gone,” Pidge tells Allura, when she asks. “They disappeared when you were opening the tear. We don’t know where they went. Or why. Though…” Pidge cuts a look towards Shiro, sitting beside Allura. “He probably has something to do with it, I guess. We’re kind of hoping you can offer us some more information. About… everything.”

Allura nods and then smiles as Hunk delivers her a plate of much-needed food, along with a glass of water. The others gather around as she drinks, offering her all of their attention.

“I suppose it all started,” she begins, once the glass is emptied, “after we thought Shiro died.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have a [tumblr](https://andtheblueberrymuffin.tumblr.com/). It is full of fics.


End file.
